Now, we’ve got to choose an irrigated crop typical of the Panhandle.  Panhandle corn production requires about 24″ of water per year.  Let’s be optimistic and say that we get half of that in the form of rainfall.  Then we’d have to provide 12″ of irrigation per year.  So we could support a total of 20 million acres of corn for one year, 10 million acres for two years, 5 million acres for 4 years, or 1 million acres for 20 years.  Roughly speaking, the Panhandle irrigates 1.5 million acres of corn each year. We could support that entire acreage with 12″/yr of irrigation for 13 years with only the water from that one storm!

Assume $2.50 per bushel and a yield of 200 bushels per acre, and that stormwater would support corn revenues of $10 billion, or $750 million per year gross revenue to Panhandle farmers.  That’s gross revenue of about $0.0015 per gallon of stormwater pumped from the Houston area.

As a point of reference, we pay maybe $0.25 per gallon of drinking water when we buy it retail from the kiosk on 34th Avenue. By that strictly economic comparison, drinking water is worth 162 times what that same water is worth irrigating corn!

What’s more, we’ve extended the life of our aquifer by 13 years.  (Corn is the biggest irrigation water-user in the Panhandle.  Cotton, sorghum, and wheat all benefit from irrigation, but they can be grown without it, albeit at much lower yields.)

Now, let’s consider the pumping costs to do this.  Assume that the infrastructure is already in place.  (It’s not.)

We need to pump 6.5 trillion gallons from roughly sea level to an elevation of 3,600 feet in Amarillo.  We need to get it completely done in two weeks so that the Houston reservoirs are emptied in time for the next big storm.  We’ll need pumps capable of 3.25 trillion gallons per week, or 322 million gallons per minute (3.22E+08 gpm).  That is roughly 25% more water than turning the Mississippi River back upstream (in New Orleans, the Mississippi averages a flow rate of 270 million gallons per minute).

We’ll need a lot of booster pumps along the way that are capable of pumping at the same rate, but we assumed that infrastructure is already in place.

The pumping lift is 3,600 feet, but there will be friction in the 700 miles of pipeline, so we have to add that friction cost into our calculations.  To minimize the friction cost, let’s assume that we can build a pipeline that is smooth enough to keep the average water velocity in the pipeline to 5 feet per second or less.  That pipeline has a diameter of 430 feet!  That’s quite a public-works project.  But it helps us keep our pumping costs down.  Let’s add an 11% premium on the pumping lift, which gives us a total lift of about 4,000 feet.

The amount of power in the flowing water is given by (4,000 feet x 3.22E+08 gpm)/3,960 = 3.25E+08 horsepower.  Our pumps are 75% efficient, and the electric motors are 85% efficient, so we need about 500 million horsepower of electricity to run the system.  We’re going to be running them for 2 weeks or 336 hours, so that’s 1.68E+11 horsepower-hours or 1.26E+11 kilowatt-hours.  Let’s assume that industrial electricity costs about $0.08 per kilowatt-hour.  We’d spend $10 billion on the energy alone!

You can’t afford it, and we don’t have the power plants to support it anyway.  And check this out:  all of the GROSS REVENUES associated with producing corn on that water would be swallowed up in paying the energy bill to pump that water up to the Panhandle…to say nothing of the infrastructure cost, which we’ve neglected thus far.

• So let’s be a bit more realistic (!), and let’s spread the pumping over a year instead of getting it done in two weeks.  Last time Houston flooded like this was in…2015!  That reduces the pumping rate to 12.4 million gallons per minute and the pipeline diameter to 84 feet.  The total pumping cost is not going to be that much different, but it will be spread over 52 weeks instead of 2 weeks.  And the infrastructure will cost a lot less.
• Just for grins, let’s use 13.3 years as the time horizon instead of one year.  Recall, we’ll be able to irrigate all 1.5 million acres of corn every year for 13.3 years with just one storm of this size.  The pumping rate is now only 932,300 gallons per minute, and the pipeline diameter is only 23 feet.  We’re making progress, but we’re still paying $10 billion to pump all of that water up the hill.

Instead of devoting the entire gross revenue of corn over that period to pumping costs, we’re going to have to come up with a more valuable use for Stormzilla water.  If it were drinking water instead, the water would be worth $1.6 trillion at retail.  That’s enough water to supply Amarilloans with 100 gallons per day for nearly 1,000 years, or to supply 9.5 billion people (the earth’s projected population in 2050) with 98 gallons per day for a whole week.